Blivet-gui 1.0 in Fedora 23

Submitted by Vojtěch Trefný on Mon, 11/30/2015 - 11:00

Blivet-gui, a graphical tool for storage management, reached an important milestone -- version 1.0 (blivet-gui 1.0 was actually already released in September and it took me more than two months to write this blog post, the latest version available in rawhide is 1.2).

So what's new since the previous blog post? Obviously, there is the new UI. The visualization in case of more complicated storage configuration is still not as good as I want, but so far I have not found any solution that would make it less complicated for configurations working with many devices. My testing machine has 25 disks with more than 20 different LVM volume groups, software RAIDs and BTRFs volumes and it's sometimes quite hard not to be confused even with the new UI.

New UI -- visualization of disk with an extended partition and "c" LVM volume group

New UI -- visualization of physical volumes of "c" LVM volume group

If you have any ideas that would make the UI and visualization better, feel free to contact me.

Other new features besides the new UI were added - some more visible, some less:

It is now possible to "force" create extended or primary partition. In previous versions of blivet-GIU, the fourth partition was always created as logical inside an extended partition.

Added support for LVM snapshots and LVM ThinProvisioning.

Simple progress is displayed when running scheduled actions.

You can specify PE size when creating an LVM Volume Group.

Blivet-gui is now Python 3 only.

I have created an (temporary) icon for blivet-gui. And I have also added AppData for blivet-gui, so it will be available in GNOME Software.

Future of blivet-gui

Blivet-gui now has all planned features. There are some small "nice-to-have" things, but new features for future versions of blivet-gui will depend on new features of blivet. Blivet now prepares for a new big release "2.0" with a lot of changes in API and code and many new features. Already implemented ones include support for LVM cache and LVM RAID (thanks to Vratislav Podzimek for implementing these). The LVM cache support is actually implemented in blivet-gui (but not yet released).